Looking across history, two periods shine as examples of democratic political evolution fostering tremendous societal advantage. One would be the founding of the American Republic, which proved highly advantageous for the yeoman farm majority until industrialism literally steamrolled the entire political and economic landscape. The second is Ancient Greece, particularly the experience of Athens. Here was birthed what came to be defined ever since as democracy.
The end of second millennium B.C. saw the decline of the Bronze Age. Greece was the western and northern frontier of the era's great Middle Eastern civilizations — Egypt, Hittites, and other Mesopotamian. Beginning 1200 B.C., the whole region started to decline, the causes are debated. In Greece, the centrally controlled Minoan “palace culture” civilization of Crete and the Aegean islands collapsed. A similar system of monarchy on mainland Greece centered around Mycenae also collapsed. Simultaneously, the eastern and southern Mediterranean civilizations of Egypt, Hittite, and Mesopotamia all floundered.
Over the next several centuries, the collapse of Greece's centralized palace-culture states allowed the creation of distributed Greek city-state civilization. In his excellent Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Josiah Ober succinctly describes the decline of the one era and the beginnings of the new. He writes,
“The collapse that terminated Bronze Age societies in Western Asia was especially severe in Greece―severe enough to overthrow large-scale social order. The collapse eliminated the Bronze Age Greek palace economies, along with economic specializations and social relationships based on formalized and asymmetrical exchanges between palace-based patrons and their clients. The collapse also lasted long enough to drown out positive memories of Bronze Age monarchy. The difficult conditions of the era fostered local interdependence along with relatively low levels of political and economic inequality: Everyone was poor, elite control was weak, and the threats of famine and piracy were endemic.”
Talk about your disruptions!
This environment fostered the rise of the Greek Classic Era of Sparta, Thebes, Athens and scores of other city-states, creating and growing a civilization whose science, math, literature, philosophy, and politics still live today across not just Greece and Europe, but the entire planet. Ober assesses,
“Classical Greece is the earliest documented case of 'democratic exceptionalism plus efflorescence'―a historically rare combination of economic, cultural, and political conditions pertaining among developed countries in the contemporary world.”
Ober notes while certain technological breakthroughs occurred, importantly the beginning of iron and steel weaponry and other implements, what was most responsible for this civilization and its relatively brief glory―its efflorescence―were cultural, political, and social innovations. He writes,
“The Greek world was arguably a standout in its development of new public institutions that served to increase the level and value of social cooperation without resort to top-down command and control. Valuable institutional innovations were spurred by high levels of local and interstate competition, and they were spread by the circulation of information and learning.”
One great innovation was the creation of the Greek alphabet and resulting development of literary culture. This innovation made capable previously unknown social organization, writing nourished cultural, political, and economic links. Many of our present institutions―political, government, and educational―grew from these Ancient Greek roots, all now wilt. Yet, growing institutional failure brings no acute examination of how they are organized and function. Most disastrously, we throw technology at the failures, technology designed by people with the least historical or political sense, and boy, that's saying something.
Along with this institutional break down, America experiences a massive degradation of political and social culture. Market values, overwhelming defined by a handful of massive corporations, dominate all aspects of society. Values not accounted by centrally controlled markets are worth little or nothing at all. We've created a neo-palace-culture. The political value of being a citizen is worthless, its debasement starkly personified by the political class themselves. The value of being a good neighbor, a member of the community, is largely nonexistent.
For the species homo sapiens, political and social value is founded in the merit of reciprocity, an understanding and practice that the actions of any individual in regards to others in some ways, at some points, are accounted either beneficial or detrimental. Reciprocity can only be gained through social and political organization, that is by association. An individual's actions may have a greater impact on the group, not directly on another individual, reciprocity may then be gained indirectly.
The great chronicler of early 19th century American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville writes, “Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.”
Tocqueville observes in the 1830s agrarian American republic, reciprocity lives in the multiplicity and ubiquity of associations―people democratically organizing for a common goal or goals. He notes,
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”
He concludes,
“Thus the most democratic country on earth is found to be, above all, the one where men in our day have most perfected the art of pursuing the object of their common desires in common and have applied this new science to the most objects... In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.”
America has lost the science of association, thus too, democracy. Organization is overwhelmingly defined by massive corporations and government, government increasingly dominated by the federal level. Value defined by mega-corporate market culture is limited, largely defined by simple transactions of stuff. This act of buying and selling is a rigid, instantaneous reciprocity. A more valuable reciprocity demands both time and degrees of complexity, defining the character of both individuals and community.
Evolutionary biologist Robert Sapolsky well describes ancient cultural reciprocity,
"In its natural form, human reciprocity is a triumph of comfortably and intuitively doing long-term math with apples and oranges―this guy over here is a superstar hunter; that other guy isn't in his league but has your back if there's a lion around; meanwhile, she's amazing at finding the best mongongo nuts, that older woman knows all about medicinal herbs, that geeky guy remembers the best stories. We know where one another live, the debit columns even out over time, and if someone is really abusing the system, we'll get around to collectively dealing with them."
Today's dominant market values defined through money transactions leave social and political complexity hidden and undervalued. Sapolsky astutely notes,
“We tend to think of market interactions as being the epitome of complexity―finding a literal common currency for an array of human needs and desires in the form of this abstraction called money. But at their core, market interactions represent an impoverishment of human reciprocity.”
Sapolsky and Tocqueville agree any society's ability to value reciprocity is based on its value of equality. The only way a society can value equality is to have certain structural equality. Sapolsky states the case,
“Put simply, cultures with more income inequality have less social capital. Trust requires reciprocity and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry. Moreover, a culture highly unequal in material resources is almost always unequal in the ability to pull the strings of power, to have efficacy, to be visible. Almost by definition, you cant have a society with both dramatic income inequality and plentiful social capital.”
Two centuries previously, Tocqueville correctly stated democracy faced no greater danger than if its business, industry, and government became centrally controlled. American democracy degraded as political, economic, and cultural power became more and more hierarchically controlled.
A rigorous examination of how current society became so hierarchical and centralized is beyond the scope of this short piece. However, a useful look can be provided on one aspect—specialization—the concentration of one field of study, one craft, one manufacture, or one profession exclusive to all others. Specialization has a long history in human affairs, recognized and extolled in political economist Adam Smith's, The Wealth of Nations. Smith points to the “division of labor,” dividing and making continuously repetitive any given task in manufacturing, as a key to efficiency. As industry grew, over the next century, this division grew ever more intricate with the addition of fossil fueled powered machinery, one could say reaching a certain art form with Henry Ford's assembly line.
Sanctified by industrial economic organization, applied across the rest of society, the division of labor was at best problematic, and in many ways detrimental, no more so than in the fields of knowledge. Certainly, specialization of knowledge provides advantages. It is inevitable as human knowledge grows deeper in any given science or in its technological applications, it requires increasing degrees of specialization. However, allowing and encouraging this specialization to exist completely separate, refusing to create necessary connections into other fields any given specialization impacts, has led to various and increasing dysfunctions for society as a whole.
Any specialized field shielded from larger context insures ineffectual politics. While specialization has reached historically unprecedented levels across society, the problems created by exclusivity are not new. Ober talks about how the Greeks countered specialization,
“Attention to the political foundation upon which the growth of human social capital was predicated helps to solve an apparent paradox: In classical Hellas the benefits of specialization were in such an abundance because specialization did not go ‘all the way down’ in the ways that are typical of centralized authority systems. Much of the work of governance in a democratic polis was done by amateurs―by citizen farmers and citizen-shoemakers, and citizen-soldiers who chose to dedicate themselves, part time to the tasks of rule-making, judgment, and administration.”
With centralization of power, the amateur check on power is lost, creating ever greater concentrations of power through specialization. Ober shows the Greeks understood this peril. He writes,
“As Thucydides’ Pericles had repeatedly pointed out, there would be no chance for Athenians to pursue private interests if the polis failed as a collective enterprise…if the educated elite used their near-monopoly as assembly speakers to warp debates in the direction of the interests of the wealthy and against those of ordinary citizens, the democracy would quickly unravel.”
What better describes governance in the present United States? In the last decades, an educated, or more accurately, a badly educated elite have done nothing but warp political debate for their own and their wealthy patrons' interests. This was accomplished through the concentration of political, economic, and cultural power. Political power was gradually concentrated in Washington DC, where it is ludicrously maintained 535 people represent 350 million Americans.
What most detrimentally rose out of specialization is expert culture. With all of society sinking in an ocean of information, and ironically, simultaneously in ignorance, reliance for too many decisions is left exclusively to the specialists, that is the experts of any field, with an inability for greater society to judge either the specialists' aptitude or interests, which time and again prove lacking in the former and exceedingly greedy in the latter.
Again, none of this is new to the human experience, unprecedentedly massive in scale and determinative in structure? Absolutely! Ober write of Athens,
“Athenian citizens proved to be quite good at identifying and attending to experts and quite capable of using the knowledge of experts for the ends of policy-making without turning state management over to them. Plato, who was highly critical of democracy on many dimensions readily conceded the point in his dialogue, Protagoras. Plato noted that when for example, the assembly was discussing the construction of warships, the 'wise Athenians' listened only to the relevant experts; ignorant citizens who wasted the assembly’s time with ill-informed opinions were quickly hooted from the speaker’s platform.”
Pretty much all running for office in America today should be hooted from the platform. Swapping faces is going do absolutely nothing in solving the challenges America and indeed humanity face. The changes that need to come are not in personnel, but are systemic. Power needs a massive devolution.
Advantageously, the United States does have an extensive established infrastructure of county government. Essentially, the changes needed to be implemented are much more than governance, involving the larger political, economic, and cultural environments. However, distributed networking of county governments can create a foundation upon which the rest can be restructured.
There's three important components to be considered in restructuring. The first is making participatory organizations ubiquitous. Second, networking these entities into distributed ordered systems. And finally, an understanding at the heart of this organization lies the ability to create, edit, and enact the infinite mass of information created by contemporary knowledge and society.
Distributed organization at the county level immediately creates three important environments. First, in regards to the economy, such networks would quickly gain a unifying understanding of the restrictions imposed by current centralized economic powers. Secondly, in dealing with humanity's numerous existential environmental challenges, such networks gain the advantages of rebuilding around local ecologies and geographies. Finally, it fosters the creation of participatory structures, thus a rebuilding of reciprocity around citizen identity, requiring a revaluing of political and economic equality.
Bringing in a lesson from the Roman Republic, Western history's third great democratic experience, the great 19th century German historian Theodor Mommsen writes in his History of Rome,
“The great principle established amidst severe conflicts, that all Roman citizens were equal in the eye of the law as respected rights and duties.... gradations to which differences of age, sagacity, cultivation, and wealth necessarily give rise in civil society, naturally also pervaded the sphere of public life; but the spirit animating the burgesses and the policy of the government uniformly operated so as to render these differences as little conspicuous as possible."
American culture once mixed patricians of wealth and the plebeians. Wealth itself was not so extraordinarily concentrated or conspicuous, most especially in public spaces, where wealth and everyone else often strode side by side. Maybe most exemplified by baseball stadiums, where today, wealth conspicuously gathers in so-called sky boxes. It is no coincidence sky-boxes were created by corporations. In ways, such separation is as detrimental and maybe more so than the knowledge hierarchies created by expert culture.
The great question is how to create more participatory organization. At this point, the only truly participatory governance in America is in the courts' jury system. The great jurist Louis Brandeis noted,
“...when I began to practice law I thought it awkward, stupid, and vulgar that a jury of twelve inexpert men should have the power to decide. I had the greatest respect for the judge. I trusted only expert opinion. Experience of life has made me democratic. I began to see that many things sanctioned by expert opinion and denounced by popular opinion were wrong.”
Sapolsky notes on participation,
“A community with high levels of such participation is one where people feel efficacious, where institutions work transparently enough that people believe they can effect change. People who feel helpless don't join organizations."
As opposed to the democracies of Ancient Athens and the early American republic, these ideas and organization are lost to the United States of today. Our politics hopelessly broken, remains focused on changing a few seats in Washington DC. A more and more desperate belief that somehow this will create a difference, even as each election cycle makes it clearer and clearer DC will not be fixed.
> We've created a neo-palace-culture.
This in particular really resonated for me.